Peter Coffee

Debates concerning e-privacy usually focus on the risk of deliberate abuse. Perhaps its more important to protect our personal data against incompetence, rather than malice. Eli Lilly, maker of the antidepressant Prozac, didnt mean to disclose the e-mail addresses of 600 users of that drug. But when the company discontinued an e-mail reminder service to […]

When I saw this ruggedized wireless terminal at the local home depot, I had two reactions. The first thing that came to mind was that wireless data devices are truly ready for real-world applications when they can survive in the hostile environment of a hardware store, surrounded by paint, sawdust and other unfriendly stuff. My […]

You may have thought that Microsoft Corp.s antitrust lawsuit was only a battle over software, but anyone who buys Intel-compatible computers can find cause for genuine anger in the June 28th Court of Appeals ruling in this case. Almost buried in pages of discussion of the Internet “browser wars” are a few short paragraphs about […]

When I saw this sign, I wondered if overenthusiastic translation had turned the English “My Mobil” to the Spanish “Mi Mobil”—ignoring the fixed association of letters and numbers on keypads. It turns out that punching “Mi Mobil” gets you Spanish-language service, a nice touch—but this sign points up other problems of user-interface translation. Is there […]

Centuries of scholarship and financial competition have been shaped by the fact that knowledge was scarce—that is, in the economic sense of being something that had to be paid for. Knowledge is power, power yields wealth, wealth enables access to knowledge: Its been a positive feedback loop, whether the knowledge in question was a map […]

Its perfectly logical that a public space should be viewable online by anyone whod like to know whats happening there. Even so, I felt a transient chill when I spotted this sign (“Activities in this Auditorium are streamed to the IBM Internet and are often recorded.”) at the entrance of an auditorium at IBMs Almaden […]

IBMs Almaden Research Center (www.almaden.ibm.com) celebrated its 15th anniversary this month, holding briefings that included key topics in nanotechnology—which Ill define as any process that manipulates atoms as individual objects. To clarify the difference between tomorrows nanotech and todays submicroscopic manufacturing, let me borrow from Ralph Merkle at Zyvex (www.zyvex. com/nano): Breaking through to nanotech […]

Improved microprocessors make other technologies more valuable. Mass storage, for example, is worth more if less expensive, faster processors can execute more demanding compression algorithms. Memory is worth more if high-bandwidth processors can sharpen and color-correct a video stream, to mention just one application, as easily as they used to optimize a single image frame. […]

Could it sweeten your day if someone you know could say, “Have an M&M”—and dispense it over the Net? Or what about a little doodle that suddenly appears on your desk to say, “Youre special”? This notion, formally termed “nonverbal communication via kinetic objects,” took shape in these and other prototype devices shown by researchers […]

College computer science programs will have the task, during the next few years, of digesting a cohort of incoming students who learned C++ as their first programming language. One wonders if remedial programming will overtake remedial writing as a drain on teaching resources. The college-level advanced placement computer science course switched from Pascal to C++ […]